


Running, Falling, Flying

by boygenius2002



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Eventual Sex, Eventual Smut, F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Idiots in Love, Mental Health Issues, Mutant, Mutant Powers, Original mutant character - Freeform, Past Abuse, Peter is a great bf, Romance, Sort Of, X-Men: Apocalypse Spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 14:48:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29668911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boygenius2002/pseuds/boygenius2002
Summary: "I love you, haystack.""I love you too, asshole."Leah Guthrie's a tough girl, she had to be. Between growing up in rural Appalachia and learning she was as powerful as a nuclear missile at the age of sixteen, having a thick skin was much more of a necessity than an accessory.She's not changing for anyone. Especially not for a foul-mouthed, silver-haired weirdo who can't keep his eyes off of her.
Relationships: Peter Maximoff/ OC, Peter Maximoff/Original Female Character, Pietro Maximoff/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	1. This Land Is Your Land

**Author's Note:**

> TW: reference to past assault in beginning flashback

**_May 3rd, 1977_ **

****

_Leah Guthrie was melting._

_Staring down at her lap, she fidgeted nervously as she felt a feverish wave of heat prickle at the back of her neck. Her thighs were sticking to the black leather of the Plymouth Road Runner passenger seat, but she knew better than to ask the man in the driver’s seat to lower a window._

_Leah wondered if he knew how damned_ hot _she was. Looking at herself in the rearview mirror, she saw her cheeks tinted with such a furious shade of red, she immediately knew she was sick. She didn’t have to look inside the collar of her t-shirt to see that ugly, irritated blotches erupted all along her neckline because she could feel the same itchy tingling feeling she’d felt for the better part of the summer rise to her skin._

_“You were right to seek my help,” the man in the driver’s seat said to her, his hands smoothing over the wheel rhythmically as he stared at her. Leah didn’t look at him, feeling another wave of heat wash over her as she leaned her elbow against the windowsill and propped her head up._

_A tiny, orange circle stained the middle of her nice white shirt, a sure sign that she must have spilled some Tang on herself during breakfast. Her denim shorts, an old pair of jeans that’d become too high-watered for her to wear and thus were converted into cutoffs, had peeled back from all her squirming and now looked scandalously short as she sat in the passenger seat._

_Leah was embarrassed. How hadn’t she seen how disheveled she looked before he picked her up? She could practically hear her mother’s annoyed intake of breath, if she could see the state of her daughter._

_The car was silent._

_“It…it was kind of you to come all this way,” Leah admitted carefully, her jaw tense and her eyes still faced away from the man._

_She hated him. She liked him. She felt special around him. She hated herself._

_The man hummed and nodded his head. “Leah,” he asked her seriously. “Have you ever opened yourself up to the Lord’s will with anybody but me? Any other…preacher, maybe?”_

_Leah said nothing._

_“Leah? I’m speaking to you. I’m trying to help you.”_

_“No,” she replied tensely. “I don’t think so.”_

_“You don’t think so?”_

_“I dunno what you mean, Pastor Tim.”_

_A finger grazed her collar, pushing back a blonde lock over her shoulder. “You don’t?”_

_“No.”_

_Her cheeks must be even redder than she thought, because Pastor Tim began to smile. He smiled whenever she felt embarrassed, except this time, her cheeks were red not because of a straying hand or a lingering touch but because she was burning from the inside out._

_His hand was heavy on her arm._

_“Can you turn on the radio?” Leah asked shakily. “Please?”_

_Giving her an amused smile, Pastor Tim leaned over and pressed a few buttons. A Woody Guthrie song her dad would sometimes hum under his breath crackled through the speakers._

_A hand shot towards her and gripped her wrist. Leah turned to him, and saw the man smiling at her tightly._

_“Let’s say a prayer.”_

_Leah closed her eyes._

_“Dear Lord,” Pastor Tim started, his eyes boring into the side of her head. “Leah’s shoulders are burdened with the weight of her sin. She is afflicted, dear Lord, and we pray that she will have the courage to show herself to you. To show herself as you intended, for her to bare herself and to accept the love you have for her.”_

_The song continued to ring out from the cassette player._

**_“This land is your land,_ **

**_And this land is my land_ **

**_From California_ **

**_To the New York Island”_ **

****

_“Leah,” Pastor Tim said warningly. “You must bare yourself to me, if you want to be absolved of your sins.”_

_Leah was sweating, and her whole body felt like it weighed a million pounds._

_Her t shirt made its way to the floor of the car._

_She felt something wet on her shoulder._

_Her head was spinning in every direction, and her stomach churned._

_She was going to be sick._

_“Wait,” Leah blurted. “Wait a second.”_

_Pastor Tim’s hand grazed up her bare back. “C’mon, Leah, we’ve been down this road before.”_

_“No, wait,” she told him desperately. Her skin felt like it was on fire. “Hang on, I’m gonna be sick.”_

_The pastor glared at her. “Don’t start gettin’ all dramatic on me, now.”_

**_“Saw below me that golden valley,_ **

**_This land was made for you and me.”_ **

****

_She tried to open her mouth again, but felt another wave of nausea come to high tide in the depths of her stomach and shut it again._

_“You have to believe I know what’s best for you,” Pastor Tim told her quietly as he pushed her into the corner of the bench seat. “If you don’t believe this, then you haven’t allowed Jesus into your heart. And if you don’t allow him in, you can’t call yourself a Christian,” the Pastor said in a flat voice._

_“Pastor,” Leah rasped out. “I don’t feel good…?”_

_“Be good, Leah.”_

_“Pastor Tim, I-“_

_“The sins you’re holding on to, every secret, evil thing, will be judged by Him. You know that, Leah. So you tell me, are you choosing to be damned? To lead a life of transgression?”_

_Lord, it was so, so hot in that car._

**_“All around me a voice was sounding,_ **

**_This land was made for you and me.”_ **

_Tears rolled down Leah’s red cheeks, a combination of her humiliation and the insane heat radiating from inside of her body causing her stomach to churn. “Pastor Tim, it’s too hot in here…“_

_Pastor Tim glared again. The wrinkle above his brow made him look older than his thirty years of age, his slick, black hair shining in the sunlight pouring in from the window._

_His Plymouth Road Runner was the nicest car in the whole hollow. He’d drive on by, tires turning slowly through the tiny, dirt roads of Cumberland County. He’d wave at members of his congregation and pull over to speak to with overwhelmed single mothers, he’d deliver fresh milk from the grocery store to families with babies being weaned on nothing but sugar water and Mountain Dew, he’d even let teen boys from the community sit behind the wheel and tell them they, too, could be blessed one day with a car as nice as his._

_Leah had once asked her mother how a man in their one-traffic light town could have bought afforded such a thing, how a man living in one of the poorest pockets of the country could have purchased a nice car in cash. Mrs. Guthrie immediately shushed her with a heated look, and she never brought it up again._

_“It’s not a sin if the Lord is present.”_

_Maybe it was the scalding temperature. Maybe it was the fact that Leah’s mother doesn’t really know where she was, that she was sitting in a car with a man she was told to trust but hardly knew and they were parked in the lot behind their church. Maybe it was the fact that she did kiss a boy a few weeks ago, a boy named Danny Howard that helped coach her little brother and other kids in the community on their Pee Wee Football League but she was pretty sure kissing wasn’t a real sin, not like having sex outside of marriage was, especially since she saw Danny’s sister kiss boys all the time and she still thought she was still a good person and all of this was very, very confusing. Panic was starting to sink into her stomach._

_“I think I should go home now, please,” Leah said quietly. Pastor Tim’s eyes narrowed at her._

_“Go home?”_

_Leah wrapped her hand around the door handle. “I don’t feel good,” she told him as seriously as she could muster. “I haven’t felt well these past few weeks and I ought to get back home, Pastor Tim, because my Momma’s gonna be awfully worried about me since she doesn’t know where I am.”_

_The man smoothed his gelled hair back, his jaw ticking as he looked at her. “Your Momma don’t know where you are? Does she know you left your house looking like…that?” he asked, his eyes staring pointedly at her shorts and then back at her. “Are you trying to tell me you’re dressed like a whore and you want me to believe you want to be forgiven? I knew you were a sinner and I’m trying to help you, Leah, I really am. You trust me, right?”_

_Despite the heat overwhelming her body, Leah freezes. “I think I should go home now, please.”_

_In seconds, she pulled back the door handle. His finger flipped over the child lock. She was stuck, overheating and sweating and panicked, in a stupid Plymouth Road Runner with a man who wouldn’t stop touching her even though he wore a chain with a cross that told her she was supposed to trust him._

**_“All around me a voice was sounding,_ **

**_This land was made for you and me.”_ **

_God, Leah thought to herself. God, if you’re listening, please help me. I’m scared, God, please help me._

_She tried to open the door again to no avail. Desperation creeps along the tendrils of her mind as the Pastor’s breathing got heavier, his eyes pouring into the back of her skull as she feels the sweat pooling in the back of her kneecaps dampen the leather beneath her._

_“Pastor Tim, I-“_

_The roaming hand pushed underneath her shorts, and Leah felt cold fear trickle down her spine as she continued to push against the door handle. “Stop it!” she yelled. “Don’t touch me!”_

_“Now Leah, I’m not gonna tell you again-“_

_“Leave me the hell alone!”_

_“You better keep your trap shut,” Pastor Tim seethed as he grabbed one of her wrists, pushing on it as he leaned up onto his knees and looked down at her._

_“You’re hurting me! Get off me, right now! Get off!”_

_Terror kicked in and the heat that had washed over Leah seemed all-consuming as her brain kicked into overdrive. She needed to get out, she needed him away. She wanted him to STOP._

_In seconds, as sweat poured down her face and mixed with her tears and she found herself underneath the much larger man, pain rippled through Leah’s arms. Her hands, glowing a hue of bright white, pushed at the man’s chest and she closed her eyes from the blinding light that emanated from her body._

_“Get OFF OF ME!” Leah screamed._

_The pastor let out an anguished cry, a hole singed with black in the center of his shirt. “What the hell is wrong with you?!” he yelled in terror. “What the hell are you doing!”_

_“Let me out,” Leah said between clenched teeth. “LET ME OUT!”_

_“You’re a demon!” the man screamed at her, spittle spraying from his mouth. “You’re a demon sent from hell!”_

_“Let me out of the car, or so help me god-“_

_Pastor Tim squeezed her face, his eyes pouring into hers in an effort to search for something Leah didn’t understand. “We drive you from us, whoever you may be, unclean spirits, all satanic powers, all infernal invaders-“_

_“STOP TOUCHING ME!”_

_“-All wicked legions, assemblies, and sects-“_

_Another wave of heat spilled out from inside her, but this one hotter and more intense than before._

**_“The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting,_ **

**_This land was made for you and me.”_ **

****

_The car exploded._

* * *

_A few hours later, Leah found herself walking along the side of Lee Highway in a daze. Numbness had blanketed itself around her after what seemed like hours of hysterics and she could feel the pavement through the worn soles of her Chucks._

_Her face, a mess of tears and snot and dirt and God knew what else, was blank with the exception of a twitch to her mouth._

_There was no way she could go home, not now. Not with blood on her hands and a burned-up husk of a car sitting in the lot of her church, not with the image of her pastor’s entire face blown apart in her head._

_She knew something was wrong with her. She had known and now, there was no going back. It wasn’t safe for her or for her family and she prayed to God that she’d be forgiven for abandoning them and for killing a person and for leaving her mother to take care of the kids all by herself._

_Suddenly, Leah heard the crunch of tires nearby. Turning around, she saw what seemed like something out of a dream as a car drove up beside her._

_A 1977 Rolls Royce Silver Shadow with tinted windows pulled over in front of her. The stark contrast between the luxury of the vehicle and the haunting rural poverty surrounding them forced her to blink. Was this a dream?_

_Her little brother Sammy loved cars. He’d never believe her if she told him she’d seen a Rolls Royce rumbling through these Kentucky hills. Not that she’d get the chance to tell him._

_The backseat window opened, and a man with kind eyes and wavy brown hair peered out of it. He stared at her, assessing the mess in front of him._

_Distantly, Leah knew she realized she should have been worried. But the strange, dissociative feeling inside her could barely register the strangeness of what was in front of her._

_“Leah Guthrie?” the man asked her in a strange accent. Foreign for sure, she recognized. Strange._

_She didn’t respond._

_“Leah, my name is Charles Xavier. And if it’s alright with you, I was hoping we might be able to sit down and have a chat.”_

_He seemed sincere._

_She didn’t trust him._

_It was dark as hell outside._

_“How do I know you won’t just up and kill me?” she asked quietly._

_The man, Charles, looked down at her hands. They were glowing._

_A tingling feeling nagged at the back of her skull. A voice._

****

**_“I have a feeling, Leah, that you’d be more than capable of handling yourself if I tried.”_ **

****

* * *

**_May 3 rd, 1983_ **

****

Leah practically smashed straight into the ground as she fell down from the sky. Her knees hurt as she made impact, and she’d be lying if she said she didn’t stumble a few steps.

“And _that…”_ Leah Guthrie said to her students with a beaming grin. “…Is _how you fly.”_

Staring at her with a mix of awe, disbelief, and distrust, every student who had signed up for Course F01: Flight 101 stood in a semi-circle as the glow in Leah’s eyes dimmed and she stretched out her legs. Behind her lay a strip of burnt grass that had become yet another landscaping burn victim of the thermo-chemical energy that emanated from her body.

Looking at the grass, she cocked her head and stared for a moment, but waved her hand at it carelessly. “Okay, so maybe don’t do all _that,”_ she instructed with an embarrassed smile. “But you get the gist of it, right? I want y’all to really focus on that propulsion factor. Because as of now, what we need to hone in on is…” Leah raised a finger up at the sky. “…Going _up.”_

“Um, _Senhorita Guthrie…“_ piped up a boy with dark, curly hair and a light Brazilian accent, looking at her skeptically.

“-Just Leah, Da Costa. I’m not a real Professor, anyhow, I’ve told y’all that-”

“…How do we go _far?_ Like, what good is flying up going to do if I just go back to the same place when I come back down? I won’t even go anywhere.”

Leah, still catching her breath, shifted the aviator goggles she wore onto her helmet and nodded at him. She placed her hands on her hips and looked up at the sky, and she licked her lips.

“Good question, Da Costa. Anyone wanna tell the class why we focus on actually _going up_ before we focus on distance and speed?” she asked.

A girl with insect-like wings rose her hand high in the air, bouncing on her heels eagerly. Leah nodded at her.

“Because it’s sort of like treading water when we swim,” the girl stated proudly. “We have to learn that before we learn anything else, because it can save our lives.”

Leah walked over and gave the girl a high-five. “Good!” she praised, assessing the rest of her students. “You’ve gotta learn how to tread before you learn how to swim. Same for flying. Going _up_ and being able to actually stay there is more important than how far you go or for how long. If you don’t know how to tread water, you drown. Now, what happens if you don’t know how to stay up when you’re flying?”

“You fall and die,” the class echoed together grievously.

Leah smiled and crossed her arms over her chest. “Exactly,” she said affirmatively. “You fall and die! And that’s not only terrible for you because you die, but it’s even _worse_ for Professor Xavier, because…?”

“…Because the Institute would get sued,” the class echoed together again.

Clapping her hands together victoriously, she grinned at her pupils. “Amazing! Y’all are so dang smart, who knows? Maybe we’ll get to cover a little distance in a week or two. _Maybe.”_

A bell rang out from inside the school, and the students jogged back over to their lazily thrown backpacks and messenger backs strewn across the grass. It was the last class of the day, and as she bid them all a goodbye, she looked back up at the sky eagerly.

Among all the reasons Leah Guthrie hated being a mutant, a succinct bulleted list she’d made that included but was not limited to the nuclear missiles attached to her shoulders and running a million degrees at all times, there was _one_ thing that made it all seem somewhat bearable.

Energy swirled around her as she felt her eyes heat up, and blinding light crackled as she burst back into the air.

_A victory lap,_ she thought to herself. _Just one last one before dinner._

An explosion sounded out from under her, but Leah paid it no mind. Breaking the sound barrier was a party trick that had become her new normal pretty quickly, even though her stomach still flipped excitedly like she was on a rollercoaster in _Kentucky Kingdom_. In her honest opinion, flying was even more incredible than homemade sweet tea and cornbread, Queen’s 1978 _Jazz_ album, and the white Reebok Freestyle Hi’s she bought with her teaching salary _combined._

There were two parts of Leah’s life- the _before,_ a time before she knew she was a mutant, when she was playing second- mother to her nine younger siblings in one of the poorest counties in Kentucky and dreaming of bigger and better things. And then, there was the _after-_ the life she had now, where she was a teacher like she’d always wanted to be (even though she was teaching kids how to soar into the sky instead of how to interpret metaphors in _Of Mice and Men)_ , she could afford to buy her own things, she had enough food on the table, and she was an entire fighter plane stored into the body of a girl who stood at a petite five-foot-four.

Both parts weighed heavy with guilt. In the _before,_ it was the feeling of guilt and shame that came from the desire to leave _._ Even on her best days back when she lived in Kentucky, she was overwhelmed with responsibilities that belonged to a woman she wasn’t rather than the girl she was- between changing shitty diapers and mucking shitty horse stalls and going to school and watching her Daddy cough black into a napkin, Leah longed to leave the hollow to go on to a real college far away, the type of place she saw on TV with kids that took ski vacations with their folks and had the money to go out to order pizza every Friday. She dreamed about going to places like New York or the Capitol or Los Angeles, about what it would be like to see something beyond dilapidated homes with old, rotting furniture loitering the front lawn.

And now, in the after, the blood that stained her hands and the irreparable damage she’d caused her family sat on her chest like a boulder that wouldn’t budge.

But at least she had an escape. She didn’t have to think of much, in fact, Leah didn’t have to think about anything at all, when she was shooting through the sky like a rocket. Even if temporarily, she could leave the ground where all her troubles and transgressions laid waiting for her.

Because in the air, miles and miles above the earth as she shot through the stratosphere, she wasn’t Leah Guthrie, a twenty-two-year-old woman with an abysmal social life with a penchant for running-or rather, _flying-_ away from all of her problems. Up here, she was _Jetstream_.

Suddenly, another explosion sounded from below her. This one, however, was definitely not from breaking Mach 1.

Leah looked down at the ground as came to a sudden halt midway through the air, her head spinning from a lack of oxygen. Her arms and legs were vibrating as they crackled with energy, and she stared down at the bright light streaks she left behind from her flight.

Down below lay the remnants of what used to be her home, nothing more than a pile of bricks and confused students strewn across the lawn.

Paling in horror, Leah raced back down to Earth faster than she’d ever flown before.

She broke Mach 9.

* * *

Peter was winded.

There really was a first time for everything- saving an entire school of mutant children, a French bulldog eating a pepperoni pizza, a fish, and _himself_ turned out to be just a tad more difficult than stealing a few TVs from _Lord & Taylor_’s.

He lifted his goggles and pushed them back into his hair. “ _Wow,”_ he exclaimed in a breathy whisper, wrinkling his nose at the disaster that lay before them. _Seriously,_ he thought to himself in disbelief. _What the fuck?_

A man in a red suit jacket turned to look at him, heaving breaths leaving his nerve-wracked body. Peter vaguely recognized him and matched his face with a familiar one he remembered from when he was merely seventeen, except the man before him looked a little older and more sure of himself.

“How…where…where did you…?”

“I was looking for the Professor,” Peter told him confusedly. “I thought he lived here.”

Coughs and cries rang out from the displaced students, and collectively they all seemed to look down at the wreckage that had once been their home. Peter turned back to the man, whose face pinched in anger as he stared at the ground.

“They took him,” the man muttered.

A million questions erupted in Peter’s brain. He asked none of them.

Another vibration rumbled through the ground, and the sound of what could only be described as a plane engine came closer and closer. A gasp escaped from someone a few feet away from where Peter was standing, and in seconds, the terrain beneath their feet rattled dangerously as something crashed into the dirt.

“ _Shit_ ,” the man in the red jacket breathed out. 

A woman clad in the strangest outfit Peter had ever seen (and trust and believe, he’d seen _plenty_ of weird shit on his travels) slammed into the grass like a brick hitting a cement sidewalk. Landing a good inch into the soil, she skidded a few feet as she caught her bearings, and left a steam path behind her as a result of the heat from her impact.

Where the hell did she come from? And how the hell did _she_ get here so fast?

“What. The. _Fuck?!”_ she screamed. She tore at the large aviator glasses on her face and threw them carelessly on the ground, marching towards the red-jacket dude and Mystique, who seemingly shifted back to her blue-self in the last few seconds.

The woman was wild-eyed and panicked, her arms raised in question as she looked around. “What the fuck happened, Hank? What the fuck just _happened?”_

“Leah…uh,” the red-jacket dude, or Hank, Peter supposed, stood with his mouth gaping as he struggled to find an answer.

By the look of the woman’s expression, for a split millisecond, Peter found himself amused and suddenly grateful he wasn’t in _that_ guy’s shoes.

Then, the woman turned to him. Blinking in confusion, her eyes flickered between him and Hank. “And who the hell are _you_?”

“Who the hell am _I?”_ Peter retorted, his voice flush with annoyance at the woman’s blunt question. “I’m the guy that just saved, like, the entirety of the student body of this school a few minutes ago. And a dog. And a fish.”

“What? Where did you even _come from_?”

“Where did I…where did _you_ come from, lady?” Peter pushed back. He looked down at the strange clothing she wore, giving her the stink-eye as best he could muster. “I thought Amelia Earhart died in the thirties. What kinda costume is _that?_ ”

The woman recoiled, her jaw slackening as she looked at him with disgust. “Excuse me,” she exclaimed in a disgusted whisper, a thick, Southern accent lacing through every word. She tore at the sleek aviator helmet on her head and discarded that alongside her goggles, releasing a blonde French-braid over her shoulder. “I will have you know that this _costume-“_

Hank sighed, and pressed a hand against his head. “Leah, _please-“_

“-is state of the art, aerodynamic-“

“… _Leah-“_

“-made from materials NASA wishes they _knew_ about. This is not a damn costume!”

Peter threw his head back in surrender, holding his hands up peacefully. Students surrounding them continued to cough and choke back heaves from the dust and dirt coating the air around them, and the blonde woman batted at a dark cloud that sprang up around her.

“Now, _Hank,”_ she snapped. “Would someone like to tell me where the hell our _school is?!”_

* * *

Peter never believed in all that “slow-mo, pan-over” bullshit he’d seen in the movies Wanda forced him to watch with her. You know, the classic scene where a guy sees a pretty girl across a hallway or on the other side of a bar, or the camera zooms in on her as her hair bounces over her shoulders. Maybe she’s some bombshell with a big personality and even bigger breasts, or she’s the perfect girl-next-door with a killer smile.

A bunch of baloney. Life didn’t work like that. _Love didn’t work like that._

But strangely enough, as the small blonde woman stood there with her hip cocked and her hands flying around in horror, Peter found himself staring at her. She had dirt smeared on her cheek, the weirdest getup he’d ever seen, and a presence that literally shook the world beneath him.

And for a moment, time slowed down.


	2. I Wanna Be Sedated

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things have taken a nasty turn for our favorite characters, and they find themselves in a seemingly desperate situation. Meanwhile, Peter reveals some personal news about himself to Leah.

**_1977_ **

_“_ _Leah,” Professor Xavier greeted calmly as she entered his office. His hands were steepled in a way Leah knew meant business; his fingertips pressed against each other as Leah collapsed into a seat across from his desk. A blonde boy, or man, rather, occupied the only other vacant seat in the office, and Hank reclined against a bookshelf as he looked at the scene in front of him with anticipation._

_“Professor,” she said with a nod of her head. “Am I in trouble, sir?”_

_Charles chuckled and tilted his head, his eyes narrowed curiously. “You always ask me that,” he noted with amusement. “Have you ever been in trouble here before?”_

_Leah flushed red. “Well…no,” she muttered under her breath. The blonde man let out an interested hum, and he met Hank’s eyes with a look she couldn’t discern. She turned away._

_“You’re not in trouble,” Charles explained. “I’ve asked you here because I’d like to make a certain… proposal, of sorts.”_

_Leah swallowed roughly. “A proposal?”_

_“Yes. In fact, I think this arrangement would be rather beneficial for the both of you, the more I think about it,” he said cheerfully. “Leah, I’d like to introduce you to Alex Summers. He was a student here many moons ago, just like yourself. Back in the good old days, he went by ‘Havok.’”_

_“Still do,” the blonde man grinned._

_Havok, Leah thought to herself. Chaos. Craziness. All things she wasn’t particularly fond of, nor did she want to be associated with. Her stomach churned nervously._

_Alex turned to her with a kind grin. His blonde hair, grown out from what looked like was once a closely cropped haircut, and his warm blue eyes immediately reminded Leah of Sam. She found herself feeling wistful despite herself._

_“Nice to meet you, Mr. Summers,” Leah said politely, sticking a hand towards him in greeting as her gaze flickered away from his too- earnest one. She immediately noticed his eyebrows raise at the sound of her voice, and she knew why without having to ask. Her thick, Kentucky drawl, like everything else about her, didn’t seem to quite fit into the sophisticated, expensive setting around them._

_Alex laughed in surprise, and with an uncomfortable handshake that felt more like a too-tight hand- hold, he nodded at her. “Uh…just Alex,” he said in a mock-serious tone. “I’m not a real Professor, anyway.”_

_Leah cleared her throat. “…Alex,” she tried out. It was weird, to call a man much older than herself by his first name rather than the titles of respect her Momma had taught her to use when talking to elders, but she acquiesced to this like she had acquiesced to everything else in her new life. “Nice to meet you.”_

_“Likewise.”_

_“You and Alex have quite a lot in common, Leah. Do you have any idea what those things might be?” Professor Xavier asked._

_Leah narrowed her eyes in thought. “I’m gonna guess you can blow things up, too?”_

_Alex grinned. “You could say that.”_

* * *

_A while later, Alex and Leah walked the grounds in search of safe practice ground, and he turned to her as they roamed the property in silence._

_“So… Charles told me you can fly,” he noted, his tone seemingly impressed. Leah scoffed, and wondered how much Professor Xavier had told him, exactly, about all of the things she could do._

_“I dunno if I’d call it flyin’, exactly,” she admitted. “Makes it sound a lot more impressive than what it is. It’s mostly me just flailin’ around.”_

_“Don’t sell yourself short. If you’re up in the air and you can stay there, that’s flying. Seems pretty groovy to me.”_

_“Groo-vy,” Leah repeated exxageratedly, the word weird and too -yuppyish on her tongue. “How do you figure that?”_

_“Well, I think it’d be sort of cool to be able to fly. I can only blow stuff up, y’know? But you can do that_ and _fly. Sounds like you drew a lucky hand,” Alex replied, his hands clasped behind his back as he kicked at pebbles under his shoe._

_“Lucky?” she asked him sarcastically. “I think you oughtta change your definition of what that word means.”_

_“You don’t think it’s at least a little cool, that you’ve got all that power stored in your tiny little self?” Alex asked jokingly, poking her in the shoulder._

_Leah’s light mood seemed to dim a little, and she turned to him with an undiscernible expression. “I’d give it all up at the drop of a hat,” she confessed quietly. “I’d give anything for life to be like it was before. There ain’t nothing cool about it.”_

_Alex’s brows furrowed at her words, and discomfort clawed at him as he thought about what Charles told him in their debrief before he came out here with the girl. He hadn’t lied, and he didn’t let Alex go into this blind, however it seemed as though the self-hatred inside Leah that the headmaster had spoken about ran deeper than he had made it out to be._

_She was only sixteen, for God’s sake. It seemed like he’d lived a million lifetimes since he was her age. In a way, Alex had._

_“Listen to me, kid,” he told her calmly. He reached a hand out to pat her shoulder, but an inner voice that sounded suspiciously like Charles made him think better of it. He quickly recoiled and brought his hand back towards himself. “It was the same for me, when I was younger. I… I felt like I destroyed everything I touched. Totally out of control, angry all the time…I… know what it’s like, to see yourself as nothing as more than a weapon, because it seems like all you do is tear shit apart.”_

_The cuss word made Leah’s cheeks pinken, but she met his gaze anyway. The words that came out of his mouth were all too familiar to the feelings she’d begun to harbor away inside of herself the minute that car exploded._

_“I… I dunno if Professor Xavier told you or not,” she said quietly. “But I hurt somebody, once. Real bad. He’s dead now.”_

_Alex stood silently, his brain working overtime as he tried to figure out how to approach the topic with kid gloves. “He did tell me,” he responded just as quietly. “And from what I can tell… it seems like it was sort-of self- defense.”_

_Leah looked away. “There’s no defending what I did.”_

_“I’m not trying to defend anything,” he explained. “I’m telling you that there’s no point in looking back at a situation you couldn’t control to try and think of all the things you wished you could’ve done differently. Especially when the regrets you have are about a person who doesn’t deserve them.”_

_But didn’t Pastor Tim deserve her guilt? It had been on Leah’s mind for as long as she’d been here- had she ever really said no, any of the other times? Did he deserve to die for what he did?_

_“I don’t want to hurt anyone else. Not ever,” she whispered. “I couldn’t live with myself if… if I hurt somebody like that, not again. I couldn’t bear it.”_

_Alex nodded. “And that’s exactly why you have to learn,” he replied seriously. “Because the more you keep this shit inside you? The more uncontrolled it is, the longer you go without letting it all out…you could try with all the willpower you’ve got, and I don’t doubt that you have more than most people. But it would take one slip up and still, you_ would _hurt somebody. You will. If you don’t try and get a handle on this.”_

_Leah’s jaw clenched, and a long breath left her mouth as her hands shook nervously. The vibrating, the tremors that wracked her limbs from all the excess energy stored inside her, thundered through her body as her hands lit up in different shades of glowing yellow and white._

_“I’ll… I’ll try,” she promised cautiously. “I want to be… I want to be better than what I am, better than… this.”_

_Smiling, Alex’s hands glowed red with plasma. “Trying’s good enough for me.”_

_For the first time since she’d gotten to the Institute, Leah felt a tiny uptick to the corner of her mouth._

_Tiny as it was, Alex thought it looked a lot like victory._

* * *

_**1983** _

“ _No._ ”

“Leah… he’s gone.”

Leah couldn’t hear him. The world was too loud and completely silent at the same time, and the ringing in her ears was deafening. What the hell was happening?

Alex was dead.

Her friend, her _mentor,_ had been killed. He was dead. He wasn’t coming back.

Leah hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye. The last thing she’d said to him was a comment over breakfast, how she thought that strawberry Pop-Tarts tasted like the smell of cheap deodorant. He’d laughed, shoving an entire half of a Pop-Tart in his mouth teasingly as he called her a weirdo with crumbs falling from his mouth.

Alex was _dead._

Her brain came back online as she watched Scott, a boy whose anger and fear was scarily reminiscent of the way her own at that age, break down in a pile of rubble. Her heart was splitting in two.

“Oh Scott,” she whispered to herself, her hand covering her mouth in disbelief as tears sprang to her eyes. “Oh Scott, I’m _so sorry.”_

She knew the heartbreak of losing family. And Alex and Scott both had, too- they had all endured the pain of having the people you love the most disappear from your life without so much as a “see you later!”

And now, Scott had lost the only person he had left.

The silver-haired man looked at everyone with genuine confusion. “I… I thought I got everyone,” the silver-haired man said, his face contorted as his eyes flickered desperately. “I was so sure, man.”

“Alex was the closest to the blast,” Hank explained quietly, his eyes flickering from the silver-haired man’s confused gaze to Leah’s stricken one. “It was…it was too late.”

A blast. Leah looked at the rubble where their school had once been. Nothing was making sense.

“Jesus _Christ,”_ Leah choked out, her hands releasing sparks from her barely contained emotion. “ _Jesus.”_

Hank extended a hand to reassure her, but after taking one look at her expression, he let it hang in the air before letting it drop down to his side. “I’m sorry, Leah,” he whispered.

Leah’s hands rested on her hips as she stared up at the sky, refusing to let the tears brimming in her eyes fall down her cheeks. “ _Jesus._ Good _Lord_ I… I saw him this _morning,_ for Christ’s sake. I saw him and he was fine and everything was fucking _fine._ What in the hell happened here, Hank? What the hell _happened?”_

Hank looked as lost as she felt. And if Hank, a literal super genius who graduated from Harvard at fifteen, couldn’t explain what happened…they were screwed.

“Hank?” she whispered again. Her jaw clenched so tightly her teeth ached, and she searched her friend’s eyes for any sign of reason. He said nothing.

And of course, because Leah was dogged by misfortune, any and all hope of mourning came to a halt. Seemingly out of the depths of hell, a helicopter descended down and landed in the grass closest to the students, and as Leah rose a hand over her eyes to protect herself from the wind, she bitterly wondered when the dominoes were going to stop falling.

**“Please remain calm. Medical assistance is on the way.”**

Kids from all over the lawn attempted to shield themselves from the dust being picked up by the helicopter’s propeller, and one by one, armed soldiers jumped out of the aircraft and made their way into the crowd of unassuming students. ‘

**“Please remain calm.”**

Leah’s hands were glowing as each and every one of the soldiers touched the ground. 

A woman with a sleek brown bob strutted forward in front of Hank, her hand waving at the soldiers eagerly. “Hey! Moira MacTaggert, CIA! Thank God you’re here!” she yelled with relief, clumsily running over to the helicopter. She greeted the soldiers gratefully, a smile gracing her features as she walked over to them.

The soldiers, guns in hand and stretchers by their side, looked past her like she hadn’t even spoken.

Cracking her knuckles, Leah punched her arms out by her sides and felt her limbs engulf themselves in blinding bright light. Hank turned to her with wide eyes.

“Leah, _no,”_ he rushed out desperately, walking towards her as quickly as he could while still keeping an eye on the camo-clad men marching down the property.

Strolling forward anyway, she wriggled her fingers and felt her eyes heat. “Sorry Hank,” she apologized with a non-committal tone. “I don’t think they’re here for a picnic.”

Walking with as much bravado as her slight frame would provide, she raised her arms just slightly as she looked one of the soldiers in the eye. “Hey y’all!” she called out loudly. “We really appreciate you comin’ all the way out here, but as a staff member I’m going to have to kindly ask you to leave-”

“Get down on the ground now!” a soldier interrupted with a yell, spittle leaving his mouth. “Put your weapons down!”

Leah narrowed her eyes. “Put yours down and we’ll call it even,” she snapped. 

But then, the soldier lifted something from his side, and Leah’s angered expression immediately shifted into one of confusion.

A gun.

“What the-?”

“ _WAIT!”_ screamed a terrified voice. Leah turned in the direction of the sound and saw Raven’s face pale as she looked at the armed trespassers in front of them.

“ _FIRE!”_

Suddenly, Leah’s entire world went side-ways and very, very dark.

* * *

The first thing Leah felt as she roused to consciousness was an intense urge to vomit.

Her body was sore from however long she had laid on the harsh metal floors of the cell she, Raven, Hank, the CIA lady, and the silver-haired man were trapped in, and her skull throbbed like she’d been clubbed in the head with a baseball bat.

The cell was exceptionally dark with the exception of thin, green laser beams stacked high on the walls.

Her arms felt like lead. Looking down as she attempted to rise to her elbows, Leah let out an annoyed sigh at the sight of her wristed restrained together by what could only be described as heavy, atrociously-orange handcuffs. 

In a clumsy effort to get to her knees, she heard her cellmates speaking among themselves, but she found that an overwhelming feeling of tiredness was too distracting to understand much of what anyone was saying.

Her head hurt. From the corner of her eye, she watched the silver-haired man rise to his feet along with her colleagues.

“Hey!” Raven screamed up at a glass window high above them. “Hey!”

A man with a military crewcut smiled down at her. “Hello, _Mystique.”_

Raven bared her teeth at him like an animal. “Major Stryker.”

“ _Colonel_ Stryker. I wouldn’t get too close to the wall, if I were you,” the man said in a faux-sympathetic voice. “It may create some…discomfort.”

Leah sat up as best as she could, still feeling strangely exhausted as she found herself on her hands and knees rasping for breath. God, she felt like she was going to be sick.

Her thick, blonde braid tumbled down next to her face as she looked up at the man in the window above her. “Dang,” she breathed out a little drunkenly, unsure why her body and mind were failing to cooperate with her. She hadn’t felt sick in a long time, not since far before her mutation rose to the surface. And unfortunately this time, her mother wasn’t here to make her chicken noodle soup and rock her to sleep.

Raven glanced over at Leah in alarm, and immediately dropped down next to her. “What’s wrong?” she demanded seriously, her hands immediately wrapping around the younger girl’s shoulders. Raven glanced back up at Stryker, and she pointed at the cuffs wrapped around her teammate’s wrists. “What the hell are _these?!”_

“A precautionary measure,” Stryker replied simply. “Miss Guthrie…or is it _Jetstream?_ Please be aware that we, of course, are taking the necessary measures to ensure everyone’s safety here at the base. That means that unfortunately for you, you _may_ feel a little… _out of sorts,_ but only temporarily. We couldn’t very well have you detained and fully charged.”

Stryker smiled like he was joking around with an old friend, and his casual tone made Leah clench her fists inside their confines. Looking up at him from beneath her blonde, teased bangs, she scoffed. “ _Cute_ ,” she bit out. “Have any other matching accessories for me? A necklace or some earrings, maybe?”

“I’d watch that mouth if I were you, Miss Guthrie. After all, it’s not _your_ safety we’re worried about.”

Clearly fed up with the lack of progress in their conversation, the woman from the CIA strutted forward and stared up at the window. “I’m Moira MacTaggert. I’m a senior officer at the CIA-“

“I know who you are, Agent MacTaggert.”

“You cannot keep me here, in this-“

“-Actually,” Stryker interrupted. “I can. A psychic event just destroyed every nuke from here to Moscow. That event emanated from exactly where we found you, the home of the world’s most powerful psychic.”

Silence followed. Leah swallowed harshly.

Stryker glared down at all of them, a feral look passing across his face. “So,” he pressed again. “You are going to tell me…where is Charles Xavier?”

Moira let out a shaky exhale as she stepped forward again. “It’s not him you should be worried about,” she said fearfully. “There’s someone _else._ Someone more powerful.”

“If you let us out of here, we can help you,” Raven tried.

Stryker narrowed his eyes at her. “Do you _really_ expect me to believe that?” he asked. “You can put on any face that you want, but I know who you are. _What_ you are.”

And with another tense silence, he walked away from the window, leaving the five of them alone in the dark, lonely cell. Fear trickled into the atmosphere like drops of fresh rain.

The viewing room above them looked empty. Knowing she may not have another chance, Leah allowed another moment to pass by before she dropped to her knees. Raising her arms high above herself, she heard someone’s startled intake of breath as she immediately rammed her cuffed wrists into the metal floor.

“What the hell are you _doing?!”_ Raven exclaimed, attempting to push the girl onto her back in an effort to get her to stop. “You’re going to hurt yourself, stop it!”

Leah ignored her, and with her mouth set in a grim line of determination, she raised her arms back up and threw them down on the ground again. Not so much as a dent was made on the hideous orange handcuffs as she continued to throw all of her weight into her actions. “No,” she breathed out between pants. “We…don’t know…how much time we have.”

“Leah, I realize this is very…uncomfortable for you,” Hank said nervously, his hands raised peacefully towards her in the hopes of helping. “But we have no idea what those cuffs are made of. We have no idea what they do. For all we know, you could blow us all up if you manage to bust them open.”

“Jee, can somebody fill me in already?” the silver-haired man asked with an annoyed tone, rolling his eyes at the display in front of him. “Why don’t _I_ get any handcuffs?”

Despite the panic climbing inside of her due to her current entrapment, the blonde found herself grinning sarcastically. “Jealous?” she bit out.

Hank rolled his eyes and looked at the man. “I suppose they realized that out of all of us, there was only one person here that stood a chance of breaking us out of here. They…they prepared for us,” he explained, his voice quieting by the end of his sentence. 

Leah sat down with her legs sprawled out, she let out heaving breaths as she tried to summon up even the smallest bit of energy. Closing her eyes, she concentrated with all of her might on the power inside her, but her efforts were fruitless. Nothing but flickering eyes and the slightest glow in her hands.

“Shit,” she seethed. “Shit, shit, _shit_.”

And then, a sudden whoosh of air, and a newfound presence by her side.

Leah closed her eyes and took in a breath. From her periphery, the sight of silver-hair just on the verge of sitting too-close for comfort appeared out of thin air.

“Soooo,” the man said awkwardly, twiddling his fingers. “I’m gonna just guess that whatever your power is, it’s pretty rad, am I right?”

Staying silent, Leah hoped that her lack of an answer would shut down any further potential for conversation so she could concentrate on how the hell she was going to get them all out of there. She was half-tempted to touch one of the green beams on the wall, wondering if electrocuting herself would jumpstart the energy that’d been sucked right out of her body, somehow.

But on the other hand, she could possibly electrocute herself and die. Her rotting corpse in the small, circular cell would probably be a bit of a mood-killer.

The man was undeterred by her silence, and he bopped his head to a beat he patted against his shiny, silver pants. He cleared his throat noticeably, and Leah let out another sigh.

“Did you need something?” she asked him tiredly. His eyes widened.

“I’m Peter, by the way. Haven’t had much time for introductions, y’know, with all the explosions and kidnappings and everything, but just figured I’d tell you.”

Leah hummed noncommittally. Inhaling, she closed her eyes and focused all of her energy into her hands again, hoping for something more than just bright, white light.

Nothing. _Nada. Zilch._

Peter grinned to himself, his gaze flickering from his pants to the side of her face. “So let’s just say we’re talking on a scale of one to ten,” he suggested casually. “Your powers…are we talking somewhere in the one range, maybe? Like, “oh, that’s pretty cool!” Or are we talking maybe closer to the five range?””

Leah rose an eyebrow. Peter leaned closer, his eyes narrowing with intrigue. 

“…Unless we’re talking a full blown ten? Full blown, atomic bomb level ten?”

With the slightest uptick of the corner of her mouth, she looked straight ahead and away from his open, earnest eyes.

“Sure,” she said in an even tone. “Ten.”

* * *

Yeah, Peter had been kidnapped and was now being held in a military prison cell with a blue furry dude, a CIA agent who had proven to be all but useless, a shapeshifter, and a _really_ pretty girl whose mental stability was, at the very least, a little questionable.

It could be said that he’d had better days. But rarely were those days spent in the company of a woman who looked like the weird lovechild of Christie Brinkley and Amelia Earhart; an angel that quite _literally_ flew down from the heavens with golden blonde hair and an accent he’d only ever heard spoken by TV stereotypes and in jest.

His mother had raised him to be a gentleman (sort of), so he knew the best way to get her attention was with a proper introduction, but it seemed as though his very attractive cellmate was preoccupied with causing herself as much bodily harm as possible in those stupid handcuffs. Peter had often been labeled the pinnacle of impatience, but he found that it was easy for him to wait for an opening as he watched her in half-awe, half- alarm as her eyes flickered like a broken flashlight and her hands looked like the glow sticks he’d stolen once from a vendor at a Grateful Dead concert.

Her name was _Leah._

And what did that stupid military guy say, again? Her codename was… Jetstreak? Jetstream?

Maybe she could make rockets come out of her hands. Or maybe she had lightning eyes, or something equally as awesome. _Rad._

Peter sat next to her, not at all bothered by the silence as their other cellmates discussed the implications of what was probably a really important conversation that he should have been paying attention to. However, there were other pressing matters at hand, one of which was the blonde woman next to him who looked like she was about to hurl any minute.

“Sure,” she told him only a moment ago, her eyes sparkling with a secret she wasn’t willing to share. “Ten.”

But only seconds later, her face paled again, and her body shuddered. Her eyes, unfocused, flickered a few times though her hands remained in a normal state.

“Uh… you okay?” he asked tentatively, his gaze darting from the side of her face to his new friends in the hopes he’d catch their attention. “Are you gonna barf?”

Leah shuddered again. “No.”

Unconvinced, Peter nodded halfheartedly. “O _-kaaay_ ,” he sing-songed. “Just to let you know, I’m sort of a sympathetic vomiter. So if you puke, _I’m_ gonna puke. And I think that might honestly make this whole military-jail situation worse, if we’re, uh…being honest with each other, and all that.”

She didn’t say anything for a second, but she seemed to realize he was anticipating a reply as he stared at her. “I’ll keep that in mind,” she said with closed eyes, her skin tinged with a sickly grey color.

God, her face was _really_ pale, and it was starting to freak him out. He didn’t even know basic First-Aid, and he really _was_ a sympathetic vomiter.

“I think I’m gonna pass out,” she said quietly, her big, blue eyes staring down at her hands. Peter let out a nervous laugh. He didn’t even know basic first aid!

Trying to seem casual, he nodded sympathetically and jerkily moved his shoulders around as he scanned around the cell for any sign of an exit. Would that military asshole dude even bother to feed them, or would they be starved into submission?

And what about the _bathroom?_

“So…before you pass out,” Peter asked tentatively, attempting a nonchalant tone as he looked at their cellmates in a heated discussion. “How long’ve you been at the Institute?”

Leah blinked at him. “Why?”

“Just asking, you know, making conversation.”

She looked up at the ceiling in thought, her head cocked as a small, bittersweet smile rose to her face. “It’ll be coming up on six years,” she replied. “Six whole years.”

Peter nodded. “And…uh, hypothetically… you ever meet Magneto, or anything?”

“No,” Leah answered shortly. “Definitely not.”

“Do you think… I mean, what do you think of him?”

“What do I think of a wanted terrorist?” Leah asked in a tired voice, her eyes narrowed at him skeptically. “Can’t say he’s on my mind very much.”

Disappointed but not really all that surprised, Peter let out an affirmative hum. “Oh.”

“Why? You want to ask him to lunch, or somethin’?” Leah asked sardonically. Peter let out an uncomfortable snort.

“He’s… sorta my father.”

The other blonde woman (or blue? What was the politically correct terminology, here?), Mystique, whipped around at his words with wide eyes and a slack jaw. “ _What?!”_ she blurted out.

Peter made a crude gesture, his eyes twinkling as he looked at both women. “Him and my mom, they did it-“

“-No, I know,” Mystique interrupted. “Are you sure?”

_Yeah,_ he thought to himself. _Going around telling people your father is a renowned criminal isn’t exactly a subtle brag._

“Yeah. He left my mom before I was born,” he explained. As she looked at him with pure shock written all over her expression, he couldn’t help but notice Leah looked sympathetic to his plight. “I met him ten years back, but I didn’t know it was him and by the time I figured it out, it was too late. Then this week I saw him on TV again, and I came to that house looking for him… but by the time I got there…”

He let out a whoosh of air, and a pained smile crossed his face in a way that didn’t meet his eyes. “Late again. Funny, for a guy who moves as fast as me…I always seem to be too late.”

He looked at Leah, whose face twisted with grief as she undoubtedly thought about her lost friend. She looked up at the ceiling and blinked harshly, but she met his gaze again. “No point wasting time, thinking about all the things we shoulda done,” she told him seriously.

It was a simple sentiment, not overly compassionate or empathetic in a way that might’ve made him uncomfortable. She didn’t attempt to reject responsibility for him either, and her response wasn’t a rare piece of advice or inspiring quote. But it was real, and it was comforting. Guilt still festered in his heart, a sense of insecurity about his own shortcomings turning its nasty head in the most inconvenient of places. He smiled despite himself.

Leah didn’t smile back, but she didn’t _not_ smile. A pair of big blue eyes, as serious as they were mirthful, turned to him and studied him closely.

“But you seriously better tell that man that he’s your Daddy. This temper tantrum he’s throwing is sorta getting out of hand, wouldn’t you say?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a review and let me know what you think!!!!


	3. Take This Sinking Boat

**_Sometime in 1977, in the Before_ **

****

_There was a sudden shift in weight in the corner of Leah’s bed, and within seconds, her eyes shot open and she found herself nearly catapulting off the mattress._

_Wet baby blue eyes that rivaled her own peered at her through the low lighting cast by the tiny nightlight in the corner of the room._

_Leah wiped a hand over her face, trying to regain her breathing as her chest moved rapidly with each intake of breath. Her second-oldest baby sister stared at her with an unwavering gaze._

_“Lord have mercy, Paige,” she bit out under her breath. “What is it?”_

_Paige looked at her somberly. “I had a nightmare.”_

_Two hands grabbed at Leah’s quilt, a silent request for permission. Leah shoved the quilt closer to her. “No,” she told her seriously. “You’re a big girl, Paige. I’m right across the room, go to your own bed.”_

_A disappointed expression passed over the eight-year-old’s face, and she jutted her bottom lip out in the hopes of winning her sister’s favor. “Please, Lee-Lee?” she asked softly. “Please, please, please? Just this once?”_

_A migraine began to pulse in the side of Leah’s temple, and she closed her eyes and hoped that Paige would simply give up. But the smaller blonde had inherited the same Guthrie stubbornness she herself had her whole life, and she tugged on the quilt again. “Pretty pretty please, Leah?”_

_Leah’s jaw clicked from the clenching of her teeth, a sudden urge to yell at her little sister filling her and leaving just as suddenly was quickly followed by guilt. She was the older sister, after all. She was supposed to help chase away nightmares and peak under beds for monsters and read stories and share secrets._

_But the secrets Leah had weren’t the types of secrets she could share with Paige. And for once, she just wanted to sleep and stop thinking so much._

_“Fine,” Leah sighed. Paige’s face lit up with excitement and immediately, Leah knew she had been duped and it was more likely that Paige wanted to have a slumber party than comfort. Maybe when she was little she had felt the same, but she didn’t have a siblings to snuggle into bed with and more than anything now she didn’t want anybody touching her._

_“But you stay on your half of the bed. Your feet are always ice-cold.”_

_Paige ignored her words and instead slipped right beside her and wrapped her arms around her back. Leah could feel her warm, soft breaths near her shoulder, and oddly, her eyes started to sting at the embrace. Torn between hugging her back and recoiling, a part of her wondered if it had really been a long time since somebody had held her in a way that made her feel like herself. At the same time, a slimy, icky feeling tingled underneath her skin, like she was infecting Paige just from her close proximity with all her wrongness._

_“You were in my dream,” Paige whispered lightly in her ear. Leah let out a hum, and the smaller girl’s arms wound around her tighter. “You went far away and you left me all alone.”_

_Leah swallowed. “Not goin’ anywhere, Paige. Just go to sleep.”_

_“I can’t.”_

_“Paige…”_

_“I’m sorry,” Paige murmured. “I’m scared that if I close my eyes, you’ll be gone when I wake up.”_

_It might have sounded ridiculous months ago, when Leah was logical and knew that she’d only left their tiny town once or twice. She knew virtually nothing about the world beyond their little farm, and if she followed the trend of all the other kids who’d grown up in the hollow, it’d stay that way._

_But logic had started to slip past in a way that scared her, and it almost started to feel like she’d gone away as soon as she’d spent her first time alone with Pastor Tim. A part of her felt like it had dimmed irreparably, and it wasn’t something that should have been possible because he was her friend and he was helping._

_He was helping._

_She squeezed her eyelids as tightly as possible to attempt to push away the sting. “I’m not going anywhere, Paige,” she whispered. “I’ll be here when you wake up, and every day after that.”_

_“You promise?”_

_“I promise.”_

_Paige fell asleep in minutes. Leah’s eyes remained open, staring at the wall as she felt the weight of her words._

_However truthful they were intended to be, they felt like a lie._

* * *

**_1983- Present_ **

****

_“Hear me inhabitants of this world… this is a message … a message to every man, woman, and mutant in the world…you have lost your way, but I have returned.”_

The inhabitants of the small, dark cell stared in confusion as a voice made its way into all five of their heads.

It was Professor Xavier. It was _Charles._

_“The day of reckoning is here...all of your buildings, all of your towers and temples will fall…and the dawn of a new age will rise, for there is nothing you can do to stop what is coming. This message is for one reason alone… to tell the strongest among you, those with the greatest power…”_

A pause. Leah looked at Raven questioningly, only for her own confusion to be reflected in her friend’s face back at her.

_“…To protect those without.”_

“How was Charles doing that without Cerebro?” Hank questioned, a dawning sense of horror creeping over his features as he tried to understand what any of that could have meant.

Leah couldn’t help but feel disturbed by the eerie silence that followed as Professor Xavier’s presence left her mind. It didn’t even sound like him though it was very clearly his voice; the words ominous and _dangerous_ until the end.

It was a warning.

A shadow fell over the glass window above the cell, and Stryker slammed his hand on the loudspeaker as he stared down at them. “I know that _voice,”_ he snapped, his jaw set and his eyes hard. “It was Xavier, wasn’t it? What’s going on?”

“We don’t know!” Raven yelled back up at him, her hands clasped to her waist as she met him with an equally hard glare. Peter threw his hands up in the air.

“We don’t know, bro!”

Stryker walked away with his bottom lip folded between his teeth in anger, and the five of them were once again left alone in the dark.

“This isn’t good,” Hank muttered to himself. “This isn’t good at all.”

Leah swallowed roughly. She agreed but kept quiet, however unlike her cellmates, her efforts were largely focused on the man in the viewing room watching them. As worried as she was about Professor Xavier, the man who had shaped her from an out-of-control, terrified teenager to the stronger woman she was today, her own survival and the survival of the people immediately around her _had_ to be the first priority.

Because she was powerless with whatever contraption encased her wrists. Because she was the only one out of the five of them who could’ve defended all of them alone, because she was the only one out of the five of them who’s abilities were defensive in their nature.

Because Leah knew all-too well what happened when evil people became afraid, she knew that Stryker’s own paranoias and escalating emotions could only mean something terrible awaited all of them.

And in the way things typically went whenever Leah was involved, somehow, things got worse.

The blaring lights of alarms flickered in the viewing room, the spinning, yellow lights a tell-tale sign that perhaps whatever it was Stryker was afraid of was already there. The shadows of bodies running around felt far too much like a taunt in her trapped state.

“What are they doing?” Moira asked aloud, standing on her tiptoes to see if she could get a better view.

A crease formed between Hank’s brows. “What’s going on?”

“We’re _fucked,”_ Leah snapped, looking directly at the CIA agent whose “elite government job” clearly meant little to nothing in their situation. “Don’t they teach y’all that at training school, or whatever? Alarms equal bad…Christ.”

Moira turned to shoot her a dirty look, but the sound of gunfire above them startled all five prisoners enough to catch their attention. The bright glare of machine guns firing reflected off of the glass, and muffled screams forced Raven and Moira to gasp and step backwards.

And dramatically, a soldier, clad in a bulletproof vest and a helmet, smashed against the window with his arms flailing. Peter, Hank, Moira and Raven all ran forward as Leah felt herself move closer and closer to the lasers. Her forehead scrunched as she weighed her options. 

Maybe, just maybe, it wouldn’t be so bad to see if she could jumpstart her powers. Maybe she wouldn’t fry to a crisp and everything would be okay.

Maybe wasn’t a sure enough thing to take that chance.

Would anybody even notice they were gone? Would anybody care, now that Professor Xavier had been kidnapped and the only people who realized what had happened were a bunch of kids who were currently homeless?

From the corner of her eye, Leah saw something blue. Her eyebrows shot high on her head, and as she took a closer look, she let out a bark of a laugh.

“ _Kurt?!”_ she blurted, feeling the early stages of a migraine pound at her head. What the actual _hell_ was going on?

Upon hearing his name, everybody stepped back and looked up at the glass only to see a blue teenager in a red Michael Jackson jacket give an unsure wave. Leah waved back half-heartedly, holding up her orange confines up to the kid.

Kurt made a series of hand motions at his imprisoned cohorts, pointing at something none of them could see and moving his mouth as if they could hear through the soundproof glass.

“What?”

“What?!”

“ _What?”_

“St..ay… way…from..”

“The what?”

“Th…do…door,”

“Get away from the door!” Raven shouted, running across the cell as everyone followed suit.

“On three…one! Two!”

The wall exploded.

* * *

There were few times Peter could honestly say he’d been happy to see a couple of sixteen-year-olds; a red-head, a kid wearing sunglasses _indoors,_ and a blue kid who’s face looked it’d been carved up with shit right out of _Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark._

But here he was, breathing out a sigh of relief at the rather pathetic looking trio. Shades, as Peter decided to mentally refer to the boy wearing red glasses inside a military bunker, slipped them back onto his face with shaking hands.

“Boy, are we glad to see you!” Leah hollered as she climbed out over the burnt husk of door, noisily blowing a blonde curl out of her face since she had limited use of her hands. “Christ almighty, what a hellhole.”

“We know where the Professor is,” the red-head said seriously, her eyes grievous as she looked at them all with an urgent expression written across her features.

Shades nodded. “I think we might have a way out of here.”

“Well, you’ve been busy,” Raven snarked as she walked over a blown piece of metal.

“We had…uh…a little help.”

“Speaking of help,” Leah breathed out. “I’m gonna have to ask for a favor, Summers.”

Peter didn’t know what his attractive new friend and former cellmate was referring to until she raised her cuffed hands, and at the sight of them, Shades paled and immediately shook his head. “Leah-”

“- _Scott_ -“

“ _No,”_ he told her seriously. “I’m not doing it. I… I could hurt you. I _will_ hurt you…I’m not doing it.”

Leah stepped forward and raised her encased wrists, setting one of her handa on his shoulder as she peered into his eyes. “You can’t hurt me, Scott,” she told him. “Think, kid, _think._ You really can’t hurt me. And even if you could, you _wouldn’t._ You’ve _got this.”_

Not exactly a trustworthy person himself, Peter thought it was a hell of a sentiment to tell a kid who literally just blew through a titanium wall. An instinct in the back of his mind told him it was best not to interrupt but despite this, he found himself walking forward towards the woman.

“Uh,” he stammered. “You sure this is a good idea?”

Leah glared at him, her mouth twisted with a snarl. “ _Shut up,”_ she seethed. “Don’t let him hear you. Unless you have a better idea?”

He didn’t. He rose his hands in surrender, and took a step back. Leah refocused her efforts on the unsure teen in front of her, her expression morphing into one of sympathy and encouragement as she looked at her student. “Summers,” she said gently. “Your brother believed in you. _I believe in you._ I know you can do this, and I promise you there ain’t nothin’ that you’re giving me that I’m not asking for.” 

Hank let out a shaky breath as he shoved his face in his hands, not wanting to watch.

Shades, studying Leah’s face for a few seconds, finally nodded and shook out his arms. Leah grinned and held her cuffs out to him, nodding eagerly and motioning for the rest of their group to gather some distance. “You’ve got this, Scott. I know you do.”

“Everybody get back.”

Shades carefully lowered his glasses halfway, the frames covering only the lower half of his closed lids as he bent closer to the orange cuffs.

And then, Peter realized those dorky glasses might have had a purpose after all.

The world turned red, and in seconds, dorky-glasses-kid was clumsily shoving his shades back onto his face. Leah’s hands burned the same ruby color for a second before glowing bright white, her eyes bursting with light.

“ _Shit,”_ Peter exclaimed with a laugh, nodding his head at her enthusiastically. Smoke fell off what had only been some sort of depowering cuff minutes ago, charred and broken on the metal floor.

He glanced at her, and his stomach flipped in a way that he’d later think about and feel deeply unsettled by. This wasn’t the place nor the time to feel his jaw slack and his mouth go dry.

Peter swallowed roughly, trying to gain some sense of composure.

Because Leah, this random girl from Mountain Dew-drinking America who was either smarter than he thought or crazier than all of them, flexed her glowing hands and seemed to stand a little taller as pure _power_ washed over her like a tidal wave. Strands of curly blonde hair stuck up with static electricity and she let out a sigh of relief.

“Told you,” she quipped at Shades. “When’s anyone gonna start listening to me around here? I know what I’m talking about!”

“Well, sorry I didn’t want to accidentally _murder_ you, Leah. I think between the both of us now, we share enough experience “accidental deaths” to start building a new graveyard section at Woodlawn, okay?!” Shades bit back, his voice dripping in bitterness. Leah’s eyes narrowed, but the red-head cut him off and stepped in front of him.

“Let’s go!” she exclaimed, already darting off down the hallway. In seconds, they all came back online as if they were all coming back to their senses and realized they were, indeed, in a ton of danger, they all began running out of the bunker as sirens roared above them.

Turning behind him, Peter caught Hank shoving the burned cuffs into the back of his pants. Raising a questioning eyebrow, Hank merely shook his head. This wasn’t time for conversation.

A sudden burst of blue exploded next to Peter. “Ah! _Jesus!”_ he shrieked in only a _slightly_ feminine octave, watching the blue guy (the younger one, obviously, since apparently there was something in the water over at Xavier’s with all this blue skin business) appear out of thin air next to him.

“Oh, sorry!” the blue kid apologized in an indistinguishable accent.

“This way!” Shades yelled, throwing his arm out to his right.

They turned down hallways that in Peter’s opinion, all started to look pretty similar, twisting and sprinting and running as quickly as the situation would allow. Even for a guy as fast as he was, these army people clearly had all sorts of tricks planned around the building, and running as quickly as he could carry himself posed all sorts of situational risks he wasn’t willing to take.

And maybe, just maybe, the idea of running at the same speed as the pretty blonde on the other side of him wasn’t all that terrible.

After what felt like ages, they ran right into the direction of a massive, closed metal door. Raven stood in front of it with challenge in her eyes, not a bit of skepticism flitting across her controlled features in the way Peter knew his own had. The doors creaked open, screeching from scraping metal and the strain of pulling weight, as alarms blared in the near distance.

Following after their unanimously decided leader, Peter stared at the room they entered in wonderment. Maybe it shouldn’t have been so much of a surprise to him, after having been kidnapped and forcibly held hostage by armed men who literally incarcerated him in a room with _laser beams,_ but a massive underground airplane hanger wasn’t exactly the sort of thing he’d expected when they walked inside.

“Hey Hank,” Raven called over to her friend, her face not betraying the slight tremor in her words. “You think you can fly this thing?”

“Yeah… I can figure it out.”

_Great,_ Peter thought to himself. _I’m gonna die on a fucking jet with not one, not two, but THREE blue people, a kid with ugly sunglasses, a CIA agent who apparently doesn’t know shit about the government she literally works for, a ginger, and a really hot girl._

_What are the odds?_

“Hey guys,” Shades said in an awe-struck voice. He pressed a button on what looked like a series of high-tech closets, and an opaque door lifted into from the floor and revealed tight, leather suits.

“The hell are those? Some sorta sex thing, or something? I’m not wearing that!” Leah exclaimed incredulously, looking at Shades with disgust.

Shades blushed scarlet red and sneered. “ _No,_ you freak,” he replied. “Flight suits.”

Leah, still looking at the suits like they were personally offending her, scoffed. “Not wearing it.”

Raven walked over and seemed to analyze the suits before she looked back at Hank. “You got your warplane,” she said lightly.

“Let’s go to war.”

* * *

Leah was used to flying. She enjoyed it. Loved it, even.

If she’d said it once she said it a million times, but being high in the sky was the most powerful and free she’d ever felt, and there were few things on the entire planet that would or could ever compare.

With that being said, the grip she had on the armrests inside the jet was so tight her knuckles were white from her efforts. It wasn’t that she was afraid that Hank’s semi-confident flying technique was cause for alarm, but rather that if the plane crashed, there was a good chance she would be the only one to survive. For some, that thought might have been a comfort. For Leah, the thought of simply not having the strength to carry her friends or enough arms to save them all, was more than terrifying.

Alex was dead. She didn’t even have the chance to save him, which would have been the least she could have done after all he’d done for her. He’d saved her from her own powers for what felt like years, and he’d died thanklessly and pointlessly in an explosion that never should have even _happened._

Their tiny little ramshackle of a team they’d assembled sat in the jet quietly; a morose, nervous atmosphere settling into the air like a viscous substance they could practically see.

Leah fidgeted in the uncomfortable flight suit. Despite what Scott said, there was just something about it that made her feel like she _was_ wearing some weird sex thing. She felt exposed at the too-tight material, like a stranger was somehow occupying the same space she was in an outfit she never would have chosen for herself.

If she died on this plane, if they _all_ died, Sam and Paige and the rest of them wouldn’t know any different.

Leah looked up at the ceiling, blinking a few times as she tried to get her mind as far away from her dead mentor and her family and back to the present. They were on a mission, and there wasn’t any time for crying when there were bigger and more important things to think about than her own loss.

From the corner of her eye, she watched a pink gum bubble burst. It had been the fifth bubble to pop in the jet since they’d boarded, and she wondered if the idiot beside her knew how damn annoying it was.

As if he could hear her thoughts (which she still couldn’t be one hundred percent sure wasn’t the case), Peter glanced at her with big eyes and an open expression. “Nervous?” he asked as he snapped the gum between his teeth.

“No,” she told him shakily. Peter looked at her like he didn’t believe her. “Terrified?” he pushed.

“…Yes.”

“You got that whole glowy thing going on, though,” he said seriously. “And Shades’ eyes literally exploded at you, and you were fine. You probably have the fewest reasons to be afraid out of all of us.”

“Not afraid for me,” Leah bit out. “Not for…not for me. Never for me.”

“For…us?”

She looked at him once, her face spasmed with pain. She nodded once.

Across from them, Jean looked over at Raven with fear in her eyes. It was the type of fear that even as a woman not much older than the teen, Leah registered to be a type of terror she wouldn’t have wished on anyone that young, the kind of fear that if they all survived what appeared to be the end of the world, would never completely go away.

A bunch of scared young people on a plane, sitting as the smartest among them flew with a noticeable tremor in his hands. Leah wanted so much more for all of them in that moment, and she wished that she could provide them with even the slightest bit of safety or solace where it seemed there was none.

The silence was tense and uncomfortable, and Jean, the sweet, almost disturbingly aware teenager she’d ever met, turned to Raven. “Were you scared?” Jean she asked the woman. “That day in D.C…were you scared?”

“No,” Raven responded simply. There was a passiveness about her words that would have caused most of them to do a double- take had they not been in the presence of a woman who’d seen and experienced more of the world than any of them would have ever wanted to. If Leah hadn’t known Raven she would have doubted the truthfulness behind her words, but Raven had been through the worst kinds of hardships life could throw. With this had come the forced adoption of a thick, impenetrable skin, and Raven was nothing if not adaptable.

A silent, creeping shame crawled over the rest of them. Raven looked back at Jean.

“…But I was scared on my first mission,” she explained. “I was on a plane like this with my friends. About your age.”

Raven smiled to herself. “We called ourselves the X-Men. Your brother was there…we used to call him Havok. He was a real handful…but when it came down to it, he was very brave.”

As the older woman recalled the memory of her lost friend, Leah felt a strange sort of kinship with her. Alex had shed the hardened, hurt persona he had as a teen long before he met Leah, and calling him ‘Havok’ felt like a great disservice to a man who had been nothing but gentle and kind and helpful, if a bit blunt and stoic. But he had been a handful, and at the mention of her friend, Leah found herself smiling wistfully. 

“What happened to the rest of the kids who went with you?” Kurt asked softly. “The X-Men?”

“Hank…Hank and I are the only ones left. I couldn’t save the rest of them.”

Another silent lull filled the air of the jet.

“I told you, I’m not a hero,” Raven whispered.

“Don’t be stupid,” Leah barked, surprised at the vitriol in her own voice despite the sentiment she was trying to express. “You _are_ a goddamn hero. You don’t need to wear spandex tighty-whities or have a heart of gold to be a good person, Raven. Alex…”

It hurt to mention him. Her voice sounded strangled as she tried to force her mouth to form the words, her eyes stinging the entire time, but she pushed on. “Alex didn’t think he was a hero either. But everybody on this plane would say differently, wouldn’t we? People like you and Alex… I think it’s hard for you to see yourself as what you are.”

“What I _am_?” Raven snapped. “And what am I, Leah?”

Leah stared at her. “Good,” she said. “You and Alex both… he was good. You _are_ good.”

Immediately, Raven’s face softened into something more neutral, her eyes flickering with slight regret at the defensiveness of her reply.

“You’re a hero to us,” Jean told her seriously. “Seeing you that day on TV…changed my life.”

Kurt nodded. “Mine too.”

“Mine too,” Peter agreed. “I mean… I still live in my mom’s basement, but, y’know…everything else, is, uh…well, it’s pretty much the same.”

He chuckled halfheartedly as Raven looked at him with a warm smile, and slowly, smiles rose to the rest of their team’s faces at Peter’s words. “I’m a total loser.”

Leah wouldn’t admit it if she’d been asked. But the laugh she let out, accompanying the chuckles of the friends around her, was undeniable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a review!!! Maybe I'll even update again sometime this week if I see that y'all are reading!

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Hello friends, I hope you've enjoyed the first chapter! I'm definitely imagining Leah as a mix of Captain Marvel and Cannonball from the comics (hint hint) for some perspective, and I'd love to hear what y'all think. I apologize for opening the story on such a triggering note but it's a super fundamental aspect of this story, however please know this is definitely as explicit as it will get in regards to assault. Take care of yourselves but also know this will not be a frequent topic in this story, just a foundational one!


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